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August 2009

I'm ecstatic to be able assist a little bit with the Social Capital Markets 2009 conference, particularly in community building. One of the tasks I'm working on involves cleaning up lists of people who are Tweeting.

If you've got a tool that does this already, good god, please let me know! But if you're like me and after some fruitless searching decided that misusing excel is always fun, here's an algorithm to follow:

The top results will almost all be file names for pictures, and the last word in the last
column wll be "normal". The exception will be when someone uses an underscore in their
TwitterID (such as the_real_shaq). There typically aren't many of those people compared to people with pictures; so scan and find those. Put the
correct TwitterID in column A. (NOTE: finding those TwitterIDs with an underscore is the only manual process. If you can think of a way to do that in an automated way on excel, let me know.)

Go to the DATA menu and select PivotTable Report... and run this report. On the last step of the wizard, select "Layout," and drag whatever is available (should be a Twitter ID, in cell A1) to the side column of the pivot table and again into the center field of the report. Finish the pivot report.

Copy the left column of the pivot table and from the EDIT menu, choose "Paste Special..." and select values.

Work I began two years ago continues
to nag at me for its importance. I would love to continue it.

The basic premise is this: I am familiar with an organization called Pacoima Beautiful. It was a brilliant success story, turning an extremely distressed community from a vicious cycle to a virtuous one. In a nutshell, by engaging the youth in community research and proposals to their representatives, they were able to teach the students not only specific scholastic skills but also how to effect change.

From there, it seemed reasonable this pattern should be replicated in most communities. It's nothing other than how to train youth to be productive members of society: what is the process for fixing things you see are broken in your community? Important lesson!

But like most successful programs, it doesn't replicate obviously into other communities. Differences of norms, communication styles and political specifics, let alone what specifically needs to be changed, make just about every aspect open to interpretation.

So I undertook to develop a mechanism for mapping intangible assets: what was done by whom in order to develop intangible assets in the organization that led to procuring the necessary financial assets? What intangible (and tangible) assets are necessary to continuing to fulfill the organization's mission?

This is of course relevant in any community, regardless of whether the mission is education, health and safety, or financial profit: how specifically are intangible assets developed? Which ones are critical and which ones are "nice to have"? Are any superfluous or downright distracting? "Best Practice" is a meaningless term because we don't know into which environment it replicates well. Best for whom?

I also used a similar analysis mechanism to recommend a financial investment a couple years ago (which continues to this day to outperform dramatically, in the ways I had hypothesized).

As we move closer to having agreed-upon criteria to measure social return, I hope to find an organization or individual interested in investing in me to continue this work.

When we invest in our child's education, it's because we expect this education not only to make them a productive member of society (which we hope will lead to positive cash flow), but also because it helps them explore the world socially and intellectually. We hope this makes them more effective community members, wiser friends, or at least entertaining conversationalists.

Although community investment in individuals is something as old as family itself, recently we are able to invest in people we have never met, using online matchmaking. Crowdsourced microfinance infrastructure such as Kiva.com was an early example of this, and we're familiar with "Friends and Family" rounds for startups.

Now there's evidently a new activity that some engage in: selling "knowledge futures" to their community in exchange for cash to attend a conference.

At the Social Capital Markets conference, one attendee has done just this, asking friends for $50 per person in exchange for sharing what he learns when he returns. Of the 8 he has asked, 6 have contributed, covering his residual cost. In a simple email to those he hopes would be able to benefit, he laid out the proposal of how much, and what he'd share.

Of course, we all help our friends by donating time and labor to tasks they need to get on their feet or to "level up," and certainly we lend out tangible goods, but it seems unusual to hear of people investing cash in something intangible. I'd be interested in other examples of microsponsorship if you have them.

I'm lifting this mini-book review straight from a particularly interesting post on GigaOm, and I was alerted to it by Sebastian Hassinger. The point is that if you are looking at how to measure morale and intangible assets, one way may be to look at how sports teams do it.

I am going to grab a copy of "Mathletics" just as soon as it materializes.

What do you think "wealth" is? Do you think we make decisions based on what makes us and our community wealthy? How do you see this changing in the future?

I did this specifically to see what the community-at-large is beginning to think about the concept. SocialEdge invited me to continue the conversation in their forum.

As the community at SocialEdge is quite sophisticated in the topic, I wanted to post excerpts here. I urge anyone who is interested to read the expanded versions -- these are tiny excerpts -- of these very thoughtful posts, and contribute to the topic. Also, on LinkedIn I've just recently initiated a group Future of Wealth.

I am moderating a week-long forum on Skoll's SocialEdge on "What is Wealth." In that, I refer to the video of the interview Charlie Rose did of Robert Shiller. It was brought to my attention that as broadband is limited in areas where many Skoll participants are, that this would be useless to them.

So I sought to provide a link to the transcript, but unfortunately, Charlie Rose's site has a layout problem, and it's unreadable, at least to me. So I copied-and-pasted it here and cleaned up the tags until it laid out like it should.

Last year was the inaugural Social Capital Markets conference. In September 2008, we were amidst the financial meltdown and the 2008 election. The "vibe" conveyed the visceral fear inherent in having to make key decisions while only knowing Worst Practices. "Confusion" was an understatement.

I was honored to participate on a panel about financing trends in the non-profit world -- and it was packed; we didn't know what interest would emerge, yet there it was. The room was packed not only with non-profit folk and funders, but others trying to develop new ways of thinking about solving the social capital growth problems using non-profit infrastructure. Like the Skoll World Forum, the brilliance in the room can be blinding.

Yet the biggest take-away from me happened when listening to the final panel, moderated by Matthew Bishop of the Economist,